Why what happened in Burundi 25 years ago matters in Alaska today

I recently read the story of a Burundian man named Deogratias who fled ethnic violence in his home country in 1994. Some 20 years after escaping to the U.S., “Deo” brings author Tracy Kidder to Burundi. They visit a priest who achieved the unthinkable at the school he ran during the height of the Hutu-Tutsi conflict: “He’d managed to make peace within the student body,” Kidder writes in “Strength in What Remains.”

How did the priest do this? He forbade radios. The author explains, “Night after night he had cloistered them and let them talk, intervening only now and then to limit the invective between Hutu and Tutsi boys.”

Sadly, what saved the students from each other made them a target of those threatened by the model of unity the school established. A rebel Hutu militia group stormed the school and when the Hutu students refused to identify the Tutsis for slaughter, the militiamen gunned them down indiscriminately, killing 40 of the 150 students as they fled.

I heard echoes of Burundi in a study I recently read. “The Perception Gap,” published in June by U.S. nonprofit More in Common, found that Republicans and Democrats are increasingly hostile toward each other, and both sides overestimate the extremism of the other’s views. On average, we estimate that 55 percent of those from the opposite political flank hold extreme views, while only 30 percent actually do. In reality, the study found, except for small minorities at the extremes, our ideas about issues like immigration and public bathrooms are not that far apart.

And in a rebuke to the notion that information fosters understanding, the study found those who report spending less time consuming news have more accurate perceptions of others’ views. The corollary also holds: Those who report spending the most time consuming news have the least accurate perceptions of their political rivals’ views. By contrast, those who report talking to people with different views are the most likely to have an accurate perception of those views. It seems science is catching up with the Burundian priest: Turn off the radio and talk to each other.

All of this corroborates my own past experience as an Alaska political journalist. Whenever I did an in-depth interview with an elected official, I came away with a more nuanced sense of the person’s views, a deeper understanding of how they came by their convictions, and a feeling that at heart, their values were not very different from my own.

Democrat Collin Allred, a former NFL linebacker turned civil rights attorney serving his first term in Congress, told GQ he’s been pleasantly surprised by his Republican colleagues: “When we’re able to have frank conversations without leadership or the press nearby, we are probably 90 percent in agreement about what needs to be done.”

Note Rep. Allred’s suggestion that there is something subversive about these conversations – without leadership or the press nearby. Powerbrokers and, arguably, the press benefit from division. Autocratic leaders take it to extremes, using propaganda to hype “otherness” and foment violence.

We’re seeing this now. The propaganda has just become, in the internet age, more insidious. We now have 24-7 access to validation – rightly or wrongly – of our worst beliefs about those we mistrust or fear. We marinate in our own biases and demonize the other.

This demonization poses a clear and present danger. The murders in El Paso, in the ABE church in Charlottesville, in the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh and elsewhere testify to rhetoric-turned-reality, banter spawning bloodshed.

We hold valid differences in policy and priorities in Alaska and in the U.S., and some hold genuinely abhorrent views. But most of us are not as far apart as we think. Perhaps it is time to turn off our radios, cloister ourselves with each other, and talk.

Because unchecked vitriol begets violence. History has proven that the unthinkable happens over and over, and it begins when we dehumanize each other. In “Strength in What Remains,” Deo visits a makeshift memorial to victims of ethnic slaughter, and takes issue with a sign declaring, “Plus jamais ca! (Never again!)”

“I have learned never to say ‘Never again,’” Deo says.

Rebecca Braun is a former Alaska political journalist and policy advisor.

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